Lynn, a former SIUE basketball player from Lincoln, Illinois, had become a household name to sports radio listeners, first in Tampa and later Portland, Oregon. He’d lived a lifetime describing games and talking about them. But when Lynn found himself out of a job after nearly 40 years in the business, he turned to the best therapy he knew.

He wrote a book.

“Sports Idols’ Idols: Heroes Of Our Heroes” is Lynn’s second book, actually. His first book, “Thornridge: The Perfect Season in Black and White,” had helped get him through a battle with colon cancer.

His second book helped fill in the gaps after he found himself laid off from his job as a sports radio host in Portland.

“I was laid off in August of 2013 from the radio station,” said Lynn, who was known as Scott Betzelberger during his days at SIUE. He’s a 1976 graduate.

“My wife and I always knew that my being laid off could happen. It’s the nature of the business. But she was laid off from her job as a nurse 10 days after me.”

In Portland, Lynn covered teams like the Trail Blazers and Oregon State University. He became one of Oregon’s most beloved broadcasters and was named the state’s Sportscaster of the Year seven times and was a three-time regional winner of the Edward R. Murrow Award.

But awards don’t feed the bulldog, as we know. So, Lynn and his wife Sharon headed back to Florida, where he had started his professional broadcasting journey in the early days of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the old Tampa Bay Rowdies and the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Lynn and his wife sold their house in Beaverton, Oregon, and returned to Tampa.

And he hit the ground running, beginning work on his second book. The result is a 569-page work that asks and answers the same question of some of the sorts world’s biggest names:

Who was your first childhood idol?

“I was a sports guys asking sports players that question,” Lynn said. “But not everybody thought of sports guys as their answer. The answers truly ran the gamut.

“You could see their eyes light up when I asked the question,” he said. “You could see their demeanor change. They were getting a chance to talk about someone who meant something to them.”

In the book, some 146 sports figures provided answers, as well as reflections on those answers.

“The majority did name a sports figure, but not all,” he said. “Some mentioned their fathers, of course, or some named the same role model.”

Lynn organized the chapters of “Sports Idols” into common themes – or common answers.

“I grouped stories together by things they had in common,” said Lynn, whose own childhood idol was Stan Musial. “All the ones who named their dad as their first idols are in the same chapter, for instance.”

Lynn was a basketball recruit out of Lincoln, who took a roundabout route to SIUE. But once he landed there, he encountered problems with vertigo and ended up leaving the team, but finished his degree in Mass Communications and did an internship at the St. Louis NBC-TV affiliate, known as KSD-TV in those days. His internship advisor was Jay Randolph.

I didn’t play a whole lot at SIUE,” said Lynn. “I think I played a total of 39 minutes and 39 seconds. But even though I had to stop because of the vertigo, (then SIUE coach) Jim Dudley was great and honored the scholarship.”

During his days at Lincoln High, the state prep basketball world was ruled by Quinn Buckner-led Dolton Thornridge, which won the final single-class boys basketball state title in 1971 and the first Class AA title the following year when two-class basketball was introduced. Thornridge with 34-1 over that two-season span.

“I thought my senior year that we might get to play Thornridge and wanted to see how we matched up,” he said. “They were an amazing team.”

That interest in Thornridge led to Lynn’s book many years later. He wrote much of it while undergoing chemotherapy for Stage 3 colon cancer. He beat the cancer and published the book. And he said his second effort is full of plenty of stories that inspired him.

The contacts Lynn has made during his years in broadcasting gave him access to a Who’s Who of sports personalities. It’s like a real-life Forrest Gump – only without the leg braces and the Dr. Pepper.

There are plenty of sports figures with St. Louis-area connections in the book, including Ozzie Smith, Joe Torre, Bill White, Joe Garagiola, Yogi Berra, Neil Lomax, Steven Jackson, former SIU Carbondale basketball stars Mike Glenn and Walt Frazier, and Harry Gallatin, the former Roxana basketball star who went on to NBA fame and later was one of Lynn’s instructors at SIUE.

“These are stories that are great for parents to share with their kids,” said Lynn, who will be signing copies of “Sports Idols” April 15 at the Barnes & Noble Bookstore in Chesterfield, Mo. on April 15. “These athletes show they are real people with real emotions. They all started as someone shooting baskets at a hoop on the garage or playing Wiffle Ball in the back yard.”